Kester Brewin

Interesting piece of research out today from Pew Internet and The American Life Project which shows that longer forms of online writing are giving way to micro-blogging and status updates:

Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for Pew and the lead author of the study, told the Associated Press that the ability to do status updates had “kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging”.

Although there were modest rises in the numbers of people blogging who were over 30 (yup, that’s me) the number of younger people, the numbers in the teenage bracket has halved and – perhaps more concerning – the number in the 18-29 bracket has fallen by about 40% in 2 years. As the BBC report on the news put it:

One student said teenagers had lost interest in blogging because they needed to type quickly and “people don’t find reading that fun”.

Should we even care? Perhaps not. But I do have some concerns which take in some wider issues of online reading – ie, we are becoming no more than scanners. We rarely take the time to read in depth, but immediately want the precis. Perhaps it’s due to a fall in quality over the years, but I’ve noticed less and less comments on my blogs – and on other people’s too. With changing reading habits people are less likely to sit down and read an entire newspaper or magazine – and this must have long term influences on the depth and breadth of our understanding of issues.

If the generation following us to no more than write about their immediate feelings in a series of status updates, we risk seeing a group of people who have a narrower view of relationship and self-awareness. And if these people are decreasingly interested in reading anything over 100 words, it is also unlikely that they will write anything over that length either. Especially if they can’t type that quick.

Who knows, this could be made better or worse by the introduction of devices like the iPad: a great ‘output’ device – but not a proper writing tool. But with a screen large enough to read more comfortably on – though a processor fast enough to encourage flicking.

Perhaps you’ve not even got this far, but if you have, you might be interested in a post I wrote a while back reflecting on Clooney’s film Good Night and Good Luck – and the parallels with the dumbing down of TV that that explored.

As for me and this site, I’ll carry on writing longer stuff. Why? Because, as the adage goes, you write to discover, not to reveal. And I’m not going to find out much about myself or my faith in 140 characters.

Craft:

Kraft:

Enough said.

Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album.

The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the Moon’ just seem so appropriate in these tough economic times – especially post Haiti’s earthquake – that I wondered if Obama had been listening when he made his decision:

I can’t pay no doctor bills
But Whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still
While whitey’s on the moon

You know, the man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon…

The racial context of 1974 America, into which the album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was clearly different to that of 2010. But ‘whitey’ still exists in other guises: the greedy bankers, the tight landlords, the traffickers and corrupt politicians – all of those who would divert money away from just causes to fulfil their own agendas.

Actually, I think the original Apollo missions turned out to be good value, but I can’t see that these would be. So it’s a good decision by Obama. Let’s just hope the money that is saved goes into welfare programmes, not weapons.

[Cartoon by Dave Walker.]

In the last couple of posts I’ve been thinking about what the form of texts add to their meaning, springboarding from a book reviewing experiment in The Believer in which the reviewer was given a novel to read which had been stripped of its cover and all meta-data about the author.

I’ve also suggested that what we see in a fundamentalist reading of Scripture is not the ‘word speaking for itself,’ as evangelicals might like to think, but ‘the word gagged’ – it is not allowed to speak, unless it says something that might challenge our unquestioning belief.

So what of the iPad?

When we look at a book what the cover and design does is aid our ability to see ourselves in it. The glossy cover acts as a mirror, so that we can see ourselves when we look at it, and see ourselves as the sort of person who would like to buy it.

With a product like the iPad, this mirroring effect has been deliberately maximised. Jobs and Apple have carefully cultivated a sense of anticipation so that our desire for the product is hyped up, and now it is finally released, the whole emphasis of the promotion is a polishing of the mirror – helping us to see ourselves in the product.

So what does the desire for this product say about what kind of person we wish to see?

Thin               Fast                  Robust

Sensual                Simple, yet sophisticated

Enjoyable                  Intelligent                  Desirable

Tough, yet soft edged                  Well Connected

These are the sorts of words that come to the fore. This is the mirror that Apple polishes.

But what of the product behind the mirror? When the reviewer had to read the stripped back novel, they were forced to actually engage with the text in a much more careful way. What is this saying? became the core question, not How is this making me feel?

I wonder, if it were possible to strip away the black polo-neck, to take away the hype and glitz and the Apple mystique and to simply use an iPad with no idea who had made it – what would we make of it then? It’s only then that we would properly be able to ask What does this do? rather than How is this making me feel?

Perhaps then we could think beyond the consumer idiocy of ‘want one, but don’t need one,’ and may be send those few hundred dollars to Haiti instead. In the mean time, ht to The Onion for another great send-up:

In the previous post I blogged about a fascinating book review in The Believer in which the reviewer was given just the text – no author, no past publications list, no endorsements and no well-designed cover. The text had to literally speak for itself, and, as someone who is about to be published again, I [...]

This month’s issue of The Believer is one of the best for some time, and carries one of the most interesting book reviews I’ve read for ages.
The book being reviewed is Momus’ Book of Jokes, but what makes the review so interesting is that the reviewer was given no information about the book at all, [...]

One interesting repercussion of the advent of the e-reader may well be the disappearance of the bookshelf. Before you scoff and say never just remember how resistant I/we were to putting our CDs and vinyl away. But away they have been put, and the solitary ipod is now the norm.
So if e-readers become more ubiquitous [...]

I have been thinking quite a bit about eMagazines recently. I don’t own a Kindle, but have played around with one, and I’m not quite ready to go there yet. But having seen some mock-ups of e-readers that we might be using in the future, I’m excited. Not about books, mind, but about magazines.
I’m a [...]

Last year was about writing the book, due out in June. There’ll be more of that here in good time. But I think it’s clearer now what this year’s focus could be.
From some of the embers of Vaux a few of us began Apple, a series of conversations around ideas of technology and theology. We [...]

Says it all. The $100m ‘loan’ from the World Bank to Haiti could be paid off like that by a fraction of the banking bonuses paid out on top of enormous salaries. Sickening.